fashion history - victorians 3

Royal children

Queen Victoria (1837-1901) and Prince Albert had nine children: Victoria (known as Vicky), Albert Edward (known as Bertie and later Edward VII) (1901-10), Alice, Alfred, Helena, Louise, Arthur, Leopold and Beatrice. The life of the royal family was of great interest to the general public. Newspapers and illustrated magazines would publish imagined views of their intimate domestic life.

The image below features one artist’s impression of a royal domestic scene, showing Victoria and Albert with their four eldest children, who are wearing typical outfits of the period, with both boys and girls wearing skirts. At this time, young boys would wear skirts until they were deemed old enough to wear either breeches or trousers, generally somewhere between the ages of two and eight.

Even in the age of industrialisation and increasing mass production of clothing, the making of garments was still labour intensive and a lot of people still literally wore their wealth. As in many families, the royal children wore hand-me-downs and altered clothes. They may have been princesses and princes but when they were little, their clothes were practical and relatively plain. The boys were often dressed in sailor suits, a trend that Victoria helped to popularise, and which she continued to encourage with her grandchildren. They were also often dressed in identical or very similar clothing.

For more formal occasions, the young princes could sometimes be seen in Highland dress. This style of clothing was particularly popular with the royals following Queen Victoria’s first visit to Balmoral in 1848, a place that became a favourite with the royal family. A surviving tunic worn by Prince Albert Edward in 1844 for the state visit of Louis-Philippe I of France shows the more formal and elaborate clothing that the young royals wore to meet foreign dignitaries.

As her children grew up, the Queen ensured that they were dressed appropriately and would often make their choices for them, even as adults. When Vicky married Prince Frederick William of Prussia in 1858, Queen Victoria chose her trousseau, which was crucial for demonstrating Vicky’s status and position to her new family and subjects. After the wedding Queen Victoria kept a close eye on what Vicky wore in public, noting on one occasion that a pink ball dress Vicky had worn in Brussels was a particular success. She advised that her daughter ‘not be impatient about all these details’ of how her outfits were received.

The royal children also had to follow standard royal etiquette in dress, so when their father died in 1861, they adopted mourning clothes as their mother did. When the Prince of Wales got married in 1863, Victoria was concerned about what her children, who ranged in age from 22 to five, should wear for their first public appearance since the death of their father. She was adamant that they dress in the appropriate mourning colours: ‘I think decidedly that none of you ought to be in colours at the wedding but in grey and silver or lilac and silver, or grey, or lilac and gold and so-on…’.

As they grew up, the royal children and their spouses displayed their own tastes and styles in dress, but generally they still followed, rather than led, fashionable trends. An exception was stylish Princess Alexandra of Denmark, who married the Prince of Wales. Her habit of wearing chokers, ribbons or high collars (actually to hide a scar on her neck) and her love of tailor-made suits were adopted by other women who wished to emulate royal style.

In many ways the clothing and fashion of Victoria and Albert’s children followed patterns that had been set by earlier generations of royal families. As for most children, their clothing had to be practical, but they also had to dress formally for certain events in a way that most non-royal children would never have done. A unique experience for the Victorian royal family, however, was the development and increasing use of photography. Visit the next step to see some photographs of the royal family from the collection of Historic Royal Palaces.

When Louis Dageurre invented the Daguerreotype (the first publicly available photographic process) in 1837, it sparked a golden age of photography. Queen Victoria (1837-1901) and Prince Albert were enthusiastic supporters of the new technology and they became early patrons of the Photographic Society. Alexandra, Princess of Wales, was also an avid photographer.

The couple and their children were photographed a number of times throughout the 1850s and Victoria created her own, personal photo albums of her children and grandchildren. In 1860 Victoria and Albert agreed to the first official photographic portraits of the family. These were to be published as a series of visiting cards. For the first time, members of the public could purchase their own photograph of the Queen.

Compared with today, when images can be captured and shared in seconds, Victorian photography was an unbelievably long and involved process. Sitters were required to sit still for up to a minute at a time, and their poses can sometimes look stiff, even uncomfortable, to our eyes.

At the time, however, photography was a medium that was seen as flexible and innovative, especially when compared with standard portraiture. Photographs could be taken indoors or outdoors, with single or multiple sitters, they could be posed or, as technology developed, more spontaneous. This opened a unique window into the private life of the royal family and created a new sense of intimacy between the monarch and her subjects.

Over a century later, it also gives us a valuable insight into the formal and casual clothing of the royal family. Click on the link below to see some examples of royal photographs from the collections at Historic Royal Palaces.